Spelling

"Original" and "president" were the two words that tripped up Brian McCarthy, 9, when he wrote his fourth-grade essay on the topic of the American flag. When his teacher gave him back his paper with the words circled, Brian's assignment was to find the correct spelling. Pushing back his desk chair and walking to the research materials section at the rear of the classroom, Brian reached for an electronic spell checker. "It takes too long to use the dictionary," Brian said as he punched in his "orginl" mistake on the electronic speller keypad.

Some things in the newspapers these days seem to be written in a code to which I don't have the key. Take the disciplinary action against the Stanford University marching band. It's not being permitted to march, a terrible thing to happen to a marching band. Once I went to Stanford and stayed to watch a football game. My companion said, "Stanford is the Harvard of the West. " Watching the Stanford team convinced me. Obviously the school emphasized finer things than football.

Have you noticed a difference in the spelling of Nikolay Zherdev's name? Last week, Zherdev requested a change in spelling of his first name. As it turns out, no one was spelling it wrong by using "Nikolai" instead of "Nikolay," as he requested. Nikolai is how it had been spelled since he entered the NHL in 2003. Zherdev arrived in Philadelphia from Russia on Sept. 14, after a delay in getting a work visa. On his Ukrainian passport, Zherdev's name is spelled "Nikolay. " That presented a problem when Zherdev wanted to cash his first paycheck of the season and the names on his check and passport didn't match.

Without a computer, David Wolf has difficulty reading and understanding his assignments. "I cannot spell; and when I write it out, I don't recognize the mistakes," said Wolf, a junior at the Delaware Valley Friends School in Bryn Mawr. "But when it's typed, I can see my spelling mistakes and distinguish between run-on sentences. I'm a visual learner and I really need to see it. " After attending six schools, Wolf is finding success at Delaware Valley Friends, in part because of its computers and word-processing program.

Since the advent of the Roaring Twenties - about the time when Shertle Park was so dubbed by the residents of Pitman - it was always assumed that "Shertle" was indeed the correct spelling. Until now. It has three spellings - Shertle, Shertal and Shertel. Only one is correct, and Louise Higgins, chairwoman of Pitman's Environmental Commission, said she was sure of the right one. Higgins said she believed that because there had never been an identifying sign in front of the park at Laurel and Lincoln Avenues, town residents had assumed the park was named after someone named Shertle.

There is an old saying that people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones at Dan Quayle. Or throw vegetables, for that matter. It turns out that the vice president, who earlier this week became the butt of jokes for spelling the word potato wrong - he spelled it potatoe - isn't the only one who has trouble with spuds. The Capitol cafeteria, which serves the tubers every day in every way, committed the same error as Quayle in its printed menu yesterday. "Double Stuffed Baked Potatoe," it read.

The Cultural Elite has jumped all over Dan Quayle for his misspelling of potato the other day at a sixth grade spelling bee. The Elitists are arguing that Quayle's single slip - he did know how to spell "president" - proves that he is a dumb bunny. How like them! I think it's unfair. What's so wrong with spelling potato with an "e"? I do it myself every once in a while. Quayle probably confused the noun potato - meaning something you bake - with its verb form potatoe, meaning to throw a potato at somebody ("The Poles dragged the harlot into the town square and began to potatoe her to death")

Estelle M. Myers, a retired waitress who didn't go to high school but could help her writer-son with his spelling, died Monday. She was 94 and lived in the Frankford section of Philadelphia. She was the mother of writer and composer James E. Myers, whose classic "Rock Around the Clock" was first recorded by Bill Haley and The Comets, ushering in the era of rock 'n' roll. The former Estelle Winters, she was raised in the Richmond section of the city when traffic sounds meant horses' hooves clicking on the cobblestones and Belgian blocks.

The competition was stiff and the Sixers were beaten last week, but it had nothing to do with dribbling, three-pointers or defense. They simply lacked experience. And the competition wasn't down at the Spectrum before thousands of screaming fans. These Sixers - sixth graders at the Upper Merion Area Middle School - were competing against senior citizens from the 59'ers club at St. Matthew's United Methodist Church in Wayne in an annual spelling bee at the school. The contest is part of an intergenerational program planned by sixth-grade team teachers Lois Nichols, Ellen Brown and Ken Hales.

Kiss catsup goodbye. After 70 years of spelling the tomato condiment catsup, Del Monte has kowtowed to ketchup. Del Monte is now applying the K-word on bottles moving through its plants in Modesto, Calif., and New Brunswick, N.J. Gradually, the K-word bottles are replacing the C-word bottles on grocery shelves nationwide. And within a few months, bottles of Del Monte catsup will be kaput. By moving into the K-column, Del Monte, which has about 10 percent of the nation's ketchup business, has accepted the spelling used by Heinz and Hunt's, the nation's key makers of ketchup.

AMC's The Killing , returning for its second season on April 1, has been called one of TV's most original murder mysteries. Its intricate story structure is unique, following a single murder case - the abduction and murder of high school student Rosie Larsen - over two 13-episode seasons. Its hero is one of a kind, an obsessive, monomaniacal, lone-wolf detective. But it isn't original at all: The Killing is a remake, a copy, of the Danish mystery Forbrydelsen (literally, "the crime")

Chillin' Wit' is a regular feature of the Daily News spotlighting a name in the news away from the job. WRITER LORENE CARY, also a Penn lecturer, founder of Arts Sanctuary in North Philadelphia and member of the School Reform Commission, is the type of person who wakes up ready to do. What, exactly? Well, it depends on the day. On this particular Sunday morning, Cary looks ready, her mouth always a centimeter away from a warm smile, her arms about a five-minute countdown to a hug. The 55-year-old West Philly native wants to be clear, "There is no chilling in my life.

DEAR ABBY: I'm writing to respond to the letter from the mother of the 12-year-old boy whose grandmother can't spell his name right. The same thing happened to my husband. Once she sent my husband a beautiful silver money clip for which she had spent several hundred dollars. She had it engraved with the wrong initials. She's such a sweet, lovely woman that I insisted he never refer to the correct spelling of his name again. He called and thanked her profusely, and we've never brought up the matter since.

I'M THE first to acknowledge that I am not a baseball purist, so I find it a bit comical when people argue against the latest proposal for expansion of the Major League Baseball playoffs on the basis that it somehow taints the sanctity of the game. It looks as if MLB will soon expand its playoffs from eight to 10 teams - possibly as early as this season. The new format would add one more wild card to the mix in each league. Those teams that don't win a division would be the Nos. 4 and 5 seeds and meet in a playoff while the three division winners would be awarded a first-round bye. All indications are that the wild-card round would be only one game for the right to advance to a five-game series against a division winner.

For John Davis, it was a dream winter - over by Halloween. That would have been just after a freak Oct. 29 storm of heavy, wet snow collapsed tree limbs, ripped down power lines, and set Davis and his public-works colleagues throughout the region to worrying: Here we go again. But after back-to-back brutal winters, neither Davis nor his peers or the best minds of meteorology imagined that that storm would be the worst of the "winter" of 2011-12. "Ordinarily you spend the winter plowing or getting ready for plowing," said Davis, borough manager in Doylestown, where tight streets and well-used sidewalks make snow removal an adventure.

By Elmore Leonard William Morrow. 263 pp. $26.99 Reviewed by David Hiltbrand It probably qualifies as ironic: Elmore Leonard, who has never made a secret of his disdain for screen adaptations of his work, writing a novel based on a TV show, Justified , that is built around one of his fictional characters. Of course, the revered crime author has a vested interest here. He's an executive producer of the series on FX. But while this may be an unusually structured tale for Leonard, it's hardly a disappointment.

Like many children the world over, Ian Paul's 4-year-old daughter does not love the taste of her cough medicine. But unlike many children's medicines, hers is kept in the pantry. It's honey, and it may actually work. Paul, a physician researcher at Pennsylvania State University, conducted one of two studies that have found that a spoonful of honey - that old home remedy - can help get your hacking kid through the night. Not everyone in the medical community is convinced about honey's cough-suppressing powers, plus it is not recommended for children younger than 12 months because of the slight chance of infant botulism.

  Every four years around this time, the 99 percent of Americans who don't live in Iowa begin to ask themselves, "Why on earth does the presidential primary calendar begin in Iowa?" Excellent question, but this one is more timely: "Why on earth should we take the Iowa caucuses seriously if it turns out that the Republican winner on Jan. 3 is none other than Ron Paul?" Yes, people, the cranky fringe candidate who wants to erase the safety net (say goodbye to Social Security and Medicare)

Patchy, dense fog was an issue this morning in much of the Philadelphia area, but sun was soon taking over, promising to lift temperatures nicely above normal. The high should be in the ballpark of the 72 reached Tuesday in the city. It should also be the 11th day without any measurable rain. The last storm was the one that brought snow - heavy outage-causing snow west and north of the city - on Oct. 29. Overnight into Thursday night, some light rain in the forecast, and temperatures should start dropping.

VANNA WHITE and Paul Holmgren may love Harry Zolnierczyk, but sports writers do not. For headline writers, he's a nightmare. Kidding, of course. Zollnerwitz is a good-looking young prospect who hopefully has a long career ahead of him, even if his name has everybody checking and rechecking the Flyers roster. By now, most of us can spell Krzyzewski as if it were K-A-T. Whoops, C-A-T. Cardinals reliever Mark Rzepczynski is rightfully nicknamed "Eye Chart. " Other than the silent "R," his last name is pronounced just the way it's spelled.